Not since the then Cassius Clay was stripped of his world title for conscientiously objecting to serving in the Vietnam War has a sportsman suffered as grave an injustice as David Warner. This opening batsman has been suspended from the Australian cricket team until the Ashes begin in July after punching his English counterpart Joe Root on the cheek.

Mr Warner accepted his punishment with dignity. “I’m here today to put my hand up,” he declared (possibly a tactical error; he might do better to keep his hand down, preferably in bondage mittens), “and own up to my actions. I’ve let not just my team mates down,” he added after a ram-raid on the Compendium of Apologetic Cliché, “but the Australia fans, the support staff, myself, my family, Germaine Greer, Sir Les Patterson, Kylie, Dannii, Uncle Ned Kelly and all.” I may have taken a few liberties there, but you get the picture.

Declining to discuss the details of the assault, Mr Warner told a press conference he was not there “to speculate”, and the caution is understandable. If only he had been an eye witness. All we know is that, in the Birmingham branch of Walkabout, an Australian-themed pub chain, in the early hours of Sunday, he was drinking in the “VIP area” (a section transformed into a magnet for the demi-monde by the catalyst of a rope cordon). What an Australian pub in Birmingham imagines it wants with a VIP area, though intriguing, need not detain us.

Anyway, Mr Warner strolled over to the bar, where the baby-faced Root was wearing a wig in the green and gold of Australia as a makeshift beard. Apparently this was a self-deprecating joke about his inability to grow a real one, though it is claimed on Mr Warner’s behalf that he mistook this for a disrespectful impersonation of Hashim Amla, an observant Muslim cricketer. Why he leapt to the misguided defence of a South African is unclear, though we must never underestimate the Australian commitment to challenging racism even where none exists. In a bold rebuke to the perceived insult, he confiscated the wig and delivered “a glancing blow”.

And for that he was suspended? Given that Walkabout’s motto is “Home of the awesome spirit of Australia”, what else was a self-respecting Aussie supposed to do there if not smack an Englishman in the chops? For conforming so rigorously to national stereotype, he should have been rewarded with the captaincy.

This was by no means the only evidence of the awesome Australian spirit on show this week. In Perth, a DJ called Howard Sattler interrogated Julia Gillard, the prime minister, over whether her partner, Tim Mathieson, is gay. “That’s absurd,” she replied. “But you hear it,” continued Mr Sattler. “He must be gay. He’s a hairdresser.” For falsely accusing his PM of allowing a hairdresser to wear her as a beard, Mr Sattler was sacked.

Coming within days of an opposition Liberal Party fundraiser at which the menu featured “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs and a Big Red Box”, what a banquet of Australiana is set before us. There are two ways of reading it. The enemy of political correctness may conclude that never has the spirit of Australia been more awesome. Others will suspect that these are troubled times for the land of plenty.

Although the economy is booming now that the country has adapted itself into a gigantic mine shaft to service the Chinese appetite for minerals, Australia’s efforts to join the rest of the democratic world in the present century appear to be faltering. Prehistoric sexism, neanderthal homophobia (or crimpophobia), brawling cricketers, and the DJ whose prank call led to the suicide of the nurse Jacintha Saldhana in December receiving an award for “Next Top Jock” from his station… If one grave embarrassment may be considered a misfortune, two as carelessness, and three as a worrying pattern, four looks like the horsemen of the apocalypse riding to the destruction of Australia’s efforts to develop more delicate sensibilities.

Ignoring such other blows as Rupert Murdoch’s divorce from Wendi Deng (not every Sino-Australian commercial partnership can end in triumph), we come to the doleful question of what ails Australia. In the absence of another facile explanation, the answer must be her dramatic sporting decline. The cricket side is rapidly becoming a joke both on and off the field, with Mr Warner’s the latest in a sequence of disciplinary fiasci. The Olympics medal haul was disastrous. Doping and match fixing scandals have riven a variety of games.

While yielding to nobody in outrage at David Gower’s recent description of the country as a land without any culture, the geography dictates that sporting success is the only way for Australia to make herself heard and respected around the world. Without it, the self-esteem plummets, and the frustration finds an outlet in a range of retrograde displacement activities as recommended by the 1952 edition of The Ocker Guide To Pool Room Etiquette.

As a loving and indulgent colonial parent, our duty is plain. England must let Australia win the Ashes. Crushing them again would be too easy, and the results catastrophic. DJs would take to playing Je T’aime whenever Ms Gillard is mentioned. Hairdressers would be lynched in Sydney. A sort of anti-Taliban mob would patrol the streets of Darwin looking for beards to burn. The only way to steer Australia out of the dark ages is to restore her sense of national pride on the field of play. The Ashes must be thrown, and I call on Joe Root, and his team-mates, to do the Christian thing, and turn the other cheek.